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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

Cute language. So just to be clear, you're putting Google ahead of North Korea, ISIS, et al on the list of threats to humanity?

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Good heavens, this is exactly the kind of thing the guidelines refer to here:

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think it's odd to even include ISIS on any list of "threats to humanity." How many orders of magnitude could more damage could Google do by accident compared to ISIS?

Not even mentioning ISIS was created by the CIA. The US is the largest state sponsor of terrorism, but private internet megacorps are the biggest threat to freedom of speech. They're both pretty bad threats, just in very different ways.

In this context, I intended "threat to humanity" to mean "a clear and present danger to the safety and security of human beings."

ISIS very intentionally kills people opposed to its goals. Google, by comparison, does not.

Whether Google is the origin story of a 1984-like dystopia is another question entirely.

How is ISIS top 2 on your list of threats to humanity? They are at best a regional threat. Google can do considerably more damage on a global scale.

The two examples I gave were not the top two, nor in any particular order.

However, they do make a practice of killing people, which Google does not.

Also, the elimination of a minor API is hardly a globally-damaging action.

Clearly the OP meant in the context of anticompetitive action the tech industry, not including foreign (at war) countries that have concentration camps. This kind of snark really takes away from the discussion.

Why is North Korea a threat to humanity?

A possibility exists that North Korea might be able to bait someone into a nuclear war.

I think this is highly unlikely. There's simply no point. NK needs nuclear weapons to stave off possible US invasion. They are not crazy people. Crazy people can't create nuclear weapons just to randomly kill people for no reason.

Come on, I have no sympathy for NK's regime, but that's victim blaming.

The threat is "baiting someone into nuclear war" and not "having tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and being ready to use them to kill millions of people"? Give me an effing break mate :)

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